“Eve ate an apple in the Garden of Eden.”
Genesis never names the fruit. It says only that the woman saw the tree was good for food and pleasant to the eyes, and took of the fruit thereof and did eat.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. — Genesis 3:6
Genesis is careful and spare here. The tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the fruit is simply called the fruit thereof. No apple, no pomegranate, no fig. The apple entered Western imagination largely through medieval art and a play on the Latin word malum, which can mean both evil and apple, and once painters settled on it the picture became fixed for everyone. Keeping the fruit unnamed actually protects the point of the passage. The sin was never about produce. It was about a command given plainly and a creature deciding she would rather judge for herself what was good, after being told the tree was to be desired to make one wise. Naming the fruit invites us to think the danger was in the object. The text puts the danger somewhere far closer to home.
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